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February 4, 2004
***The hurt of conceit***
I'll preface this by saying I'm not a modest person. Not when it comes to workouts, in any case. I'm usually the best one in the group, sometimes including the instructor. I know it, and I like the feeling that everyone's watching me. So when I walked into the gym for my first-ever Tae Bo class I was pretty confident.
I mean, I'm fitter than fit, I'm an ex-ballet dancer and my husband's an ex-boxer. I'll kick a--, right?
"First time?" the instructor inquired.
I nodded.
"First time's hard" she said. "If you don't get the moves, don't worry, just don't stop."
I nodded.
The next hour was all about me showing off what I could do. True to my own expectation and to the instructor's surprise, I kicked a--.
Didn't matter that 45 minutes into the class I seriously thought I was having a heart attack or a stroke or something fatal like that. The room was going dark and my ears felt like I was at the top of a mountain. Punch punch duck puch wham kick. I wasn't going to slow down though, nope. I needed to show off, needed the awe and the envy. I made it through the class, though my body was screaming for a time-out. It is that physical perserverance that got me to the corps de ballet in a first-rate company, even though my physique is less than ideal (which is why I only got as far as the corps) and my true calling in life was to become an academic like my parents.
Showered and made it to work, feeling like I'd been run over by a steamroller.
The next morning, the only thing I could move without excruciating pain was my eyeballs. Everything hurt. I hadn't felt like that EVER! Here I had thought I was in excellent shape and it turned out I had hundreds of muscles that in 25 years of high-level physical activity I'd never even used. It would have been funny, but my abs hurt way too much to laugh.
No pain, no gain, right?
***Andrei and Anna***
We tried moving Andrei to the next group at preschool (4-5 year olds), but when I saw that they spent long periods of time seated behind desks meticulously copying letters of the alphabet into notebooks, I moved him right back to the 3-4 year olds. He'll have the rest of his life to sit behind a desk. I'd like to prolong his "innocent childhood" just a bit longer.
Toilet humor. Anybody's kids go through a toilet humor phase? Anna says the word "bottom" and they're both busting up. Anything to do with poo, pee or bottoms is guaranteed hysterical laughter. As for sex organs, neither Anna nor Andrei seems to pay much attention to them. Anna once asked me where her penis was and Andrei inquired as to whether I'd broken it off, but that's really all the interest they've shown. Girls have a "pissi" and boys have a "pissulka" and that seems to satisfy them.
Do you use the anatomically correct terms with your children, or do you have "special" names for sex organs? In Russian, it's very unusual to ever use the word "penis", kind of a medical term. The more common (polite) term is "member" (male member) for adults and "pissulka" for small boys. For adult females vagina is fine and "pissi" for small girls. When I was a kid I had a "petunia" and my brother had a "ding-dong". Don't know where my parents thought those up!
I think it was Nicole who inquired as to when children are too old to see their parents nude. Well, since I am home alone with the kids until 10 a.m. when the nanny comes and I leave for work, I shower with the door open. Just don't want to be in an environment where I can't see or hear the kids (ie in closed bathroom with my head under the shower). So they quite often see me naked. Andrei less now that he's in pre-school (Dima drives him there at 8 o'clock), but yet ... again, other than a few questions about why I have hair there (you will too when you grow up), they aren't too curious, preferring to run in and tell me about what Big Bird is doing on Sesame Street or that Anna won't let Andrei use her stethoscope. Here it's quite common to go to the sauna, so it's usual for girls to see their moms naked, and boys to see their dads, but as to mixed - I don't know. So far, I think it's fine, though I prefer to take showers with the door closed.
*** Pregnancy ***
It's not TTC for us. We don't have to try. Usually we get pregnant any time we have sex (unprotected). We don't do any kind of fertility monitoring, or charting, just have sex when we feel like it. Usually it works. The issue for us (me) is staying pregnant. So we've decided to give it another chance this month, and I should know in a bit less than a week. I know a few women here have genetic issues which keep a pregnancy from being viable. I think if I get pregnant this time and it doesn't "stick", it's something I will look into. So far I'm 2 for 6. Two children from 6 pregnancies (OK, three of them ended very early, but I'm terrified of another double D&C experience).
I think it's time to get back to work.
Warm regards,
Lisa
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